Comment by Barbing
12 hours ago
>Apple is well known for walled gardens, but for the most part, you can be sure they will let you change your default search engine without much hassle.
Respectfully, please, this below is an absolute joke--has it changed in a decade?
Image: Apple provides easy changing for Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia. (That poor paid search engine that starts with a K has to mess around with extensions; I'm unaffiliated.)
Plus, even though I have it set to DuckDuckGo, when I ask Siri to "search {query}", it searches Google. So even the default I have set is not actually truly the all-around default. Embarrassing to have locked this down as if I didn't drop a grand on the phone.
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Fun fact: for years now, asking Siri to "search Google Images" results in whitelabeled Bing Images (thankfully, exceptionally easy to remedy with the excellent Shortcuts: "Picture-Search" for Google, quality difference night & day unfortunately... anyway go SearXNG!, it lets you keep your soul).
This enlightening fact has burst my hubris bubble. Shows how much I know about iOS (e.g., the marketing). Well, I hope the EU comes up with a good alternative. I'm sure they'll have some law that requires all searches be age-verified and reported to the government, but at least we can bet the implementation will be "sovereign" and distanced from FAANG.